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Comment by jws | Hacker News Reader

Programmers need to remember that users are like this: (from an Apple discussion thread)

… [periodically]'installd' begins using 100% of all 4 CPU cores, my fan goes full speed and the whole computer gets very hot. Seems to happen before Software Update checks for updates. I usually go to the terminal and kill the 'installd' process, which reduces the fan speed and heat to normal within a minute.

I wonder if this guy is also one that says you need to reinstall from scratch every few months to keep things working?

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The reaction of the user is not suprising. No background-daemon should use all 4 cores and be that noticable. Users don't feel good when the computer starts to make thing on his own they don't expect.

Ubuntu had or has the same issue with a deamon used for the graphical package-administrations-guis rebuilding an index (I forgot the name). They tried to help themselves with appropriate nice-settings, defused the issue, but on old machines you still need to move the cronjob to monthly to have a usable system.

You simply can't use the system properly when a background-process uses all ressources. And one normally want do something else than wait for the system. I consider such behaviour a bug.

"You simply can't use the system properly when a background-process uses all ressources. And one normally want do something else than wait for the system. I consider such behaviour a bug."

Agreed, but to add to your point, if your background process is taking up all the resources in my system, that defeats the purpose of being a background process.

You are probably talking about apt-xapian-index. It rebuilds its indexes once a week, consuming all system resources. I had an old notebook, which became unusable every weekend. I did not want to buy a new machine, so I simply deinstalled apt-xapian-index package. :-)

I'm a programmer but not a Mac user. I fail to see what is wrong with the bug report above. Care to explain?

"installd" is a completely undocumented (outside of Apple) daemon that is somehow involved in installing your software (it runs while installing App store programs) and checking to see what updates you might need. It has no user visible existence. No one would ever know about it unless they ran "ps" or something similar. They will find no hint at what it does, or if killing it is safe.

Thanks for the explanation. I still don't think it's a good example in the context of this thread. My impression is similar to onli's:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3699158

installd is part of framework that handles installed packages. It's fired up as part of the normal software update process (although it really shouldn't be taking a core for itself). Killing it would probably abort the software update process.

I have seen installd peg my CPU to 100% and have killed it. What would you suggest I do?

One of the most annoying features of modern OSes is when some system process just decides to start going wild, eating memory and CPU. Often I find reinstalling is the only way to fix such things.

Let it finish. It has some thinking to do, maybe crypto checksums? Maybe just a really inefficient corner case on an algorithm. There's nothing wrong with letting your CPU work. if running at 100% makes your machine flakey, it is broken.

If your foreground performance is being impacted too severely (and I haven't seen this from installd, I just noticed and researched installd while removing Mac Keeper (malware) from my wife's laptop) then reboot. It's extreme, but it has the best chance of getting your processes shut down cleanly as opposed to a kill where you could nail a process in the middle of a state that really does not want to persist. Programmers are a lazy sort. They won't consider the effect of termination at each point in their program. You are hunting for bugs using your live system as bait if you kill a program.

"then reboot. It's extreme, but it has the best chance of getting your processes shut down cleanly as opposed to a kill"

so... how do reboots work on OS X ? on every *nix flavor I know, there's one command that just halts the damn machine and damn the torpedoes, and there's one command that does it more gracefully, by sending progressively harder-to-ignore signals to ~every process except init, ending up on SIGKILL (which is not trappable).

A standard reboot from the GUI should be fine. If you boot up in verbose mode there are some amusing messages that are displayed at the top of the screen during reboot/shut down when a program has to be force quit by the OS.

More than weekly (but fairly randomly) I used to find installd would peg my CPU to 100% and just stay there for hours. It doesn't make my machine flakey, but it makes it slow and I have other things to do.

In the end I just reinstalled my OS, restored files from Time Machine, and everything was fine. I never did figure out why it was misbehaving. I have had (once) a similar problem with spotlight. Fortunately there I knew enough to run lsof to find it had got snuck in an infinite loop on one particular mp3 file, which I just deleted.

However, my point (which I should probably have been clearer about) is that bits of OSes are known to just start going wild for no reason, and often killing them, and eventually reinstalling, is the only option.

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